After the Germans invaded Poland, the Lewis brothers opened up The Kilns to children forced to evacuate the big cities. The first group was four school girls, and throughout the war several other groups of children came in and out of their home. The highlight during this time was a delightful sixteen-year-old named June Flewett. She brought much fun and laughter to the household. The Lewises’ gift of hospitality was being reciprocated by the gift of joy that emanated from this young lady.

In his later years Lewis opened his home to a brash, gifted, divorced, Jewish American follower of Jesus, Joy Gresham Davidman, and her two sons. This relationship, retold in the movie Shadowlands, once again highlights Lewis’s hospitality. After spending time with Joy’s sons, David and Douglas, Lewis wrote humorously in a letter to his friend Ruth Pitter, “I never knew what we celibates are shielded from. I will never laugh at parents again. Not that the boys weren’t a delight: but a delight like surf-bathing which leaves one breathless and aching. The energy, the tempo, is what kills.”

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This toddler is bound to be a thrifty spender.

Fourteen-month-old Sorella Stoute has already made her first adult purchase ”” a 1962 Austin-Healey Sprite.

While her dad wasn’t looking, the little girl used his smartphone to snag the car for a clean $225 on eBay.

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Anglicanism was the fastest-growing major Christian tradition in Africa between 1970 and 2010, while the centre of gravity of Christianity has shifted to the Global South, reports a study published by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts,.

Demographic data published in “Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970”“2020: Society, Religion, and Mission” reports that while agnosticism and atheism has grown in Europe and Christianity plateaued, Europe remains the exception on the world scene as religions continue to gather new adherents round the world.

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American evangelicals’ view of themselves should resemble more closely that held by the church in the first century than that held by Christians in recent decades, Southern Baptist ethicist Russell D. Moore said in a nationally televised interview.

Moore, in an appearance on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” Monday (July 8), said there was a message for evangelicals and other social conservatives in the U.S. Supreme Court’s invalidation of a federal law defining marriage as only between a man and a woman.

“For a long time, social conservatives in America had a kind of silent majority view of ourselves, and conservative evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics had a moral majority view of ourselves, as though we somehow represent the mainstream of American culture — most people really agree with us except for some elites somewhere,” the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission said. “That really isn’t the case.”

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There are few of us who have not learned by experience the remedial value of suffering when we have used it as a sacrament. It is astonishing how evanescent the memory of pain is, both in its acute and in its more prolonged forms, and how living a thing is the deposit made by a right correspondence with the opportunity hidden in the heart of suffering. This latter softens the disposition of that which at the moment seemed like unrelieved disaster and, as we look back, gives a benign expression to its severe countenance. To the growing character all his past suffering is a distinct asset, and from none of it would he be separated. He would not, if he could, eliminate a single pang.

The memory of past suffering and its deposit is varied. First and highest stands the vicarious suffering by which we lived in the lives of others and, without fault ourselves, shared the shame and sorrow of others, or else entered into the rich experience of blameless sufferers. Perhaps there is no pain quite like it for intensity. Then there comes the sharing of the common lot in which we receive our due portion of harsh treatment at the rough hand of those relentless forces which are resident in the nature of which we are a part. Some, many, there are who appear to be afflicted beyond measure and without apparent reason. The disparity of suffering is one of the most baffling features of the mystery and would be a fatal one were it not that the most perfect, the one altogether perfect, representative of the human family was afflicted beyond His brethren of every age, and not only took no hurt but even reaped a golden harvest for the world from the field of His suffering. With His stripes we are healed.

And then there are the pangs which we can trace directly to our own fault, and which are nothing more or less than the chastising of the benignly austere hand of God….

—The Mount of Vision: Being a Study of Life in Terms of the Whole, Chapter 8, by Bishop Charles Henry Brent

Not long after moving to the University of Southampton, Constantine Sedikides had lunch with a colleague in the psychology department and described some unusual symptoms he’d been feeling. A few times a week, he was suddenly hit with nostalgia for his previous home at the University of North Carolina: memories of old friends, Tar Heel basketball games, fried okra, the sweet smells of autumn in Chapel Hill.

His colleague, a clinical psychologist, made an immediate diagnosis. He must be depressed. Why else live in the past? Nostalgia had been considered a disorder ever since the term was coined by a 17th-century Swiss physician who attributed soldiers’ mental and physical maladies to their longing to return home ”” nostos in Greek, and the accompanying pain, algos.

But Dr. Sedikides didn’t want to return to any home ”” not to Chapel Hill, not to his native Greece ”” and he insisted to his lunch companion that he wasn’t in pain.

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Almighty and everlasting God, whose precepts are the wisdom of a loving Father: Give us grace, following the teaching and example of thy servant Benedict, to walk with loving and willing hearts in the school of the Lord’s service; let thine ears be open unto our prayers; and prosper with thy blessing the work of our hands; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O Lord Jesus Christ, who when on earth wast ever about thy Father’s business: Grant that we may not grow weary in well-doing. Give us grace to do all in thy name. Be thou the beginning and the end of all: the pattern whom we follow, the redeemer in whom we trust, the master whom we serve, the friend to whom we look for sympathy. May we never shrink from our duty from any fear of man. Make us faithful unto death; and bring us at last into thy eternal presence, where with the Father and the Holy Ghost thou livest and reignest for ever.

–E. B. Pusey

So he called them in to be his guests. The next day he rose and went off with them, and some of the brethren from Joppa accompanied him. And on the following day they entered Caesare’a. Cornelius was expecting them and had called together his kinsmen and close friends. When Peter entered, Cornelius met him and fell down at his feet and worshiped him. But Peter lifted him up, saying, “Stand up; I too am a man.”

–Acts 10:23-26

Long long overdue and worth some scrutiny.

[i]update: We’re “bumping” this up the page, since the Anglican Ink website is now working again after one or two days of problems. — the elves.[/i]

As Americans who believe in a “one man, one woman” definition of marriage become a minority for the first time ever, evangelical Christians actually have become more opposed to same-sex marriage, a recent Barna Group survey found.

Barna’s June poll results revealed that as Americans have become more aware of the LGBTQ community’s agenda, a majority of Americans have likewise become more accepting of legal recognition of same-sex unions and granting these unions equal rights.

Catholics, other religious groups, and religious nones have shown large increases in support for legal recognition of gay rights, but churchgoing Protestants””and evangelicals in particular””have maintained firm opposition to the legal measures on social and moral grounds.

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General Synod met in York over the weekend, running through to Tuesday with strong representation from this diocese.

While a lot of media coverage centred on the on-going issue of finding acceptable legislation for those who oppose women bishops, there were a number of other important issues discussed.

A very serious and shocking statement from the sex abuse victim support groups led to a sincere apology from Justin Welby on behalf of the whole church and a removal of the twelve month rule within which complaints had to be raised. It also exposed the lack of pastoral care given to those in need.

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The Primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, Nicholas Okoh has condemned the emergence of the ‘get rich quick’ sermon that is the rave of most Pentecostal Churches in the country.

Speaking as a guest on Channels Television’s programme View From The Top, Archbishop Okoh said this was not the foundation that was laid by the missionaries who introduce Christianity in Nigeria.

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It is becoming increasingly clear that homosexuality will be a defining issue for the twenty-first century church, at least here in North America. It seems inevitable that same-sex marriage will soon be legalized across America; it has been the law in Canada for several years now. Meanwhile the acceptance and celebration of homosexuality is becoming a cultural shibboleth, a means of determining who has a voice worth hearing and who does not.

In the middle of all this is the Christian church which, since time immemorial, has held that the Bible forbids homosexuality. Is it time, as so many insist, for Christians to take a second look at the Bible, to get with the times, and to embrace homosexuality as a valid lifestyle, a valid expression of love and sexuality?

Many Christians feel threatened, like their backs are against the wall, and that this issue represents a major threat to their faith. But is it possible that Christians have been thinking about the issue all wrong? In his new book Love Into Light, Peter Hubbard asks, “What if homosexuality is not a threat but an opportunity?….”

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